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The paper burden

Oh, this is just too good. The leader of the UK conservative party, David Cameron, has been bragging about his green credentials lately (remember, they're sane in the UK, so they demand that all their leaders have green cred), and urging other MPs to change their personal behavior to demonstrate green values.

Oops:

David Cameron was forced to backtrack on his personal green credentials yesterday by admitting that he traveled to work by bicycle not to cut carbon emissions, but because he found it enjoyable.

The Conservative leader had to switch tack after it emerged that his car followed him carrying briefing papers and his shoes on the days that he cycled from his Notting Hill home to Westminster.

Hee hee. But it gets better:

O’ Canada, where have you gone?

Seems Canadians who thought they were so different from their southern neighbors have to take another look at what their new government just proposed to do to Canada's climate funding. Going south, so to speak.

A Wendell Berry poem for Wednesday

We Who Prayed and Wept

We who prayed and wept
for liberty from kings
and the yoke of liberty
accept the tyranny of things
we do not need.
In plenitude too free,
we have become adept
beneath the yoke of greed.

Those who will not learn
in plenty to keep their place
must learn it by their need
when they have had their way
and the fields spurn their seed.
We have failed Thy grace.
Lord, I flinch and pray,
send Thy necessity.

-----

from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

So Much for Our Plans to Get Chip on Rushmore

NPS won’t loosen ad guidelines; Yellowstone contemplates wireless A National Park Service proposal to accept money from tobacco and alcohol companies and engrave donor names on benches and bricks was shot down when new marketing guidelines were issued Monday. Public comment had been highly critical of the proposal. “We give the Park Service significant credit […]

Dirty Deeds Done Crappily

Hanford nuclear-waste site is a big ol’ mess The cleanup effort at the nuke-waste-riddled Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state is looking like one big fustercluck. The finish date has been delayed from 2011 to 2017 or later, extending the time that 53 million gallons of radioactive and toxic waste will sit in leak-prone tanks […]

Is Our Children Learning?

U.S. government study finds human-caused climate change real; Bushies unconvinced A scientific study commissioned by the Bush administration has demolished one of the key arguments of climate skeptics, concluding yesterday that there is no discrepancy in rates of warming at Earth’s surface and in the troposphere. Oh, and also that there is “clear evidence of […]

Webby or Not, Here We Come …

Vote for Grist in the Webby Awards! It’s down to the wire, folks: voting in the Webby Awards — “the only award show for internet sites that matters” — ends at midnight PDT on Friday, May 5. In the magazine category, there’s a neck-and-neck race between National Geographic and a scrappy little mag we like […]

Umbra on herbicides and lawns

Dear Umbra, My husband just spread some very toxic weed-killer on our lawn, and I told him there must be a safer way to get rid of weeds. Our children and pets were not allowed on the lawn for 24 hours. We have a well and septic system, and I was wondering if that stuff […]

How birding and blogging changed one soldier’s time in Iraq

Glassing the evening sky for feather and foe. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Trouern-Trend. Jonathan Trouern-Trend has been a dedicated bird-watcher since he was about 12. So in 2004, when the now 38-year-old Connecticut National Guard sergeant got sent to Iraq, he had birds on the brain. While stationed at Camp Anaconda — a huge American […]

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck …

Andy Revkin, NYT's climate reporter, brings news of a just-released federal study on climate change which shows "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system."

For a moment I'm shouting, "All right! We're moving past debate and into problem solving."

But ... not to be undone by their own research conclusions, policy officials note that "while the new finding was important, the administration's policy remained focused on studying the remaining questions and using voluntary means to slow the growth in emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide."

There's also this:

Dr. Christy [one of the study's authors] also said that even given what the models projected, it would be impossible to slow warming noticeably in the coming decades. Countries would be wise to seek ways to adapt to warming, he added, even as they seek new sources of energy that do not emit heat-trapping gases.

So, we simultaneously resist admitting this is a big problem and jump right past prevention to adaptation.

I'm guessing this report will spark some change, and it does knock another leg out from the feds' already tottering chair of denial. But it still amazes me that it's so incredibly difficult for us to deal with the problem squarely.